Charly's Column – Wildcards

The pleasure of owning a nice domain like sensorenresidenz.de is clouded by the requirement of an X.509 certificate for every subdomain that the admin wants or has. Columnist Charly can help boost the webmaster's spirits.

Certificates from Let's Encrypt [1] are free and popular – supposedly half of all digital certificates used on the web originate there. However, anyone running web servers with many subdomains has had the displeasure of having to manage a bag full of certificates. A single wildcard certificate from one of the usual certification bodies solves the problem in principle, but it is expensive.

This changed in March 2018: All those who have access to their domain name's DNS server can now also obtain wildcard certificates from Let's Encrypt.

If you have not yet installed the Let's Encrypt client, you can load it as follows: